Loading plugins by default

Shreevatsa R shreevatsa.public at gmail.com
Thu Mar 26 01:08:52 EDT 2009


What would be a good way to distribute Pidgin such that some plugins
are loaded by default?

More context:
Albert Zeyer has made some modifications (#2629, #8448) so that Pidgin
can be distributed as a a single .app bundle:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-macosx/
He chose to enable some plugins he viewed as useful, in such a way
that they get loaded by default each time Pidgin is started. This
means that the user's preferences (of which plugins to load) are
ignored, so I'm wondering if there is a better way to do this.

I can think of a few things; which of the following would work?
1. Just ship a default prefs.xml that loads those plugins. Does Pidgin
look for preferences in any "system location" other than
$USER/.purple/prefs.xml, where this could be put?
2. A script that creates the default preferences file in the user's
directory only if the user does not already have a prefs.xml. There
are issues with when/how to run the script (since there is no
"install" to speak of) and having to do it for multiple users, so this
is probably not a good idea.
3. A special plugin that loads the default set of plugins, and which
can be turned off. Is such a plugin possible?
4. Some better mechanism, which I haven't thought of or am not aware of.

Thanks for any suggestions,
-Shreevatsa




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